Catherine Lutz

The Wars Less Known

Yossarian tensed with alert astonishment when he

heard Colonel Korn’s concluding words. ‘‘What’s
that?’’ he exclaimed. ‘‘What have you and Colonel
Cathcart got to do with my country? You’re not
the same.’’
‘‘How can you separate us?’’ Colonel Korn inquired
with ironical tranquility.
‘‘That’s right,’’ Colonel Cathcart cried emphatically.
‘‘You’re either for us or against us. There’s no two ways
about it.’’
‘‘I’m afraid he’s got you,’’ added Colonel Korn.
‘‘You’re either for us or against your country. It’s as
simple as that.’’
—Joseph Heller, Catch-
The world we live in—its divisions and conflicts, its
widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly
inexplicable outbursts of violence—is shaped far less
by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the
painful events we try to forget.
—Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost

The wars of the United States have been show-

ered with prose suggesting that they burst open
not bodies, but history. War gives birth to new
beginnings, the story goes, even moving the
course of human events in positive, if also tragic,

The South Atlantic Quarterly :, Spring .

Copyright ©  by Duke University Press.
286 Catherine Lutz

ways. Given this belief in war’s grandeur and its tectonic role, what followed
September , , had to be declared another good war. And because most
of its victims were homefront civilians, it was called a war like no other. But
while the hijackers who heinously killed so many that day may have cre-
ated a new kind of violent spectacle, they were not the authors of one of the
human era’s uniquely horrific events. For, I wearily note, we have been here
before, and we have been led to forget. Today’s war without end began long
ago, and it has produced both the corpses of battle and economic and physi-
cal casualties in other arenas. Because you may not read this dark tale of two
kinds of violence unless there is some small light to be had, the ending will
suggest the sources of hope to which I cling.

I will begin with the unrecognized long war at home, and with an airplane
flight I took just after New Year’s Day . As it turned out, I was assigned
a place on the aisle in a large jet, with young men headed to the Marine’s
Parris Island training camp in every other seat around me. I was not sur-
prised that it seemed to be the first flight for many, given the military’s still
heavy recruitment from the struggling classes. So there were some hysteri-
cal blurts of laughter, nervous comments, and macho posturing. One espe-
cially anxious young man, a boy really, retrieved his Bible and started to pray,
but soon began retching violently into an airsickness bag. I asked his seat-
mate if this was fear of flying, and he said, ‘‘I guess, ma’am, he’s just sick
about the plane and the boot camp all mixed together.’’
This boy-man had likely heard stories about the rituals of humiliation and
physical trials that he would have to undergo at Parris Island. Though he
knew that these promised to make a man of him, he could fear beatings
and other, more elaborate physical hazing, and the psychological tortures of
having his face smeared with lipstick and his neck strung with dead fish,
mostly at the hands of his fellow soldiers. He would have signed on nonethe-
less because his recruiter and other devices of the annual two-billion-dollar
budget devoted to military labor marketing had also promised he would
enter the ranks of the super-citizen, the true patriot. And because it made
military life look like a job-training program or a Dungeons and Dragons
game as much or more than preparation for killing or being killed, that ad-
vertising promised safety. Oddly, this is something the military may in fact
deliver. That is because the war they go to might be like most of the sixty-
 The Wars Less Known 287

six acknowledged U.S. foreign interventions since  in relying on aerial

bombardment to first ‘‘soften’’ their targets (often already made pliant by in-
tense poverty). Training accident or friendly fire deaths aside, this has meant
that a total of just  soldiers died in battle in the last two decades, a number
equal to the U.S. highway death toll that accumulates in just five days. People
walking into their first day of work at poultry processing plants speckled
throughout the poor Carolina counties around their boot camp should vomit
at the doorway, too. For they suffer higher rates of death and disability on
the job than do soldiers.
Just a few days earlier, I had sensed nausea pulse through another arena
of war as well, this in an NPR story about the controversy over U.S. treat-
ment of the Camp X-Ray prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Like the rest of the
mainstream media, the station was paying devoted attention to a ‘‘national
security intellectual’’ who was asked whether these prisoners were treated
humanely and in accordance with international law governing POWs. The
academic defended U.S. government actions, asserting that the camp was
being governed, as she put it, by the ‘‘customs’’ if not the laws of warfare,
such as the Geneva Convention. When asked what these customs were, she
answered that they were simply practices that were in ‘‘good taste.’’
The intellectual and the boy-man were both struggling with queasiness
inside the machinery of war (though he was much closer to the gears than
she). But its mechanisms have become increasingly invisible since at least
the s. It was in that early era of militarization that C. Wright Mills
pointed out that the nation was coming to accept an all-encompassing ‘‘mili-
tary definition of reality.’’ If we follow the young men to their destination,
though, there are some routes around that wall of normalization of a gigan-
tic army, and a world defined by the idea of threat.
They were headed to a place very like Fayetteville, North Carolina, a city
of some , souls adjacent to the army’s Fort Bragg where I have con-
ducted anthropological and historical research.1 It is just one of the ,
major active-duty U.S. military bases and , such places, large and small,
active duty and reserve, domestic and foreign. Like Fayetteville, many are
places where pervasive child poverty, domestic violence, prostitution, envi-
ronmental catastrophes large and small, and homelessness coexist with the
nation’s massive state of war readiness. The situation in these towns con-
stitutes a significant part of the U.S. way of life that the military is said to
protect. And it does make such a world possible, if not in the sense usually
288 Catherine Lutz

intended by that phrase: the army helps create the city’s conditions of im-
miseration through the political economy that supports it, as I detail later
in this essay. Only by magical thinking could one imagine how it could be
otherwise: how having the most powerful military human history has ever
seen could come without massive and disguised costs.
There are many more people like the recruits than the NPR commenta-
tor on the homefront of militarization, that is, many more people who can
be considered the friendly fire casualties of war. These casualties include
the people who make a poverty wage working retail jobs, the main type of
work created by the post as soldiers go into town to buy burgers and fries,
shower curtains, tattoos, or sneakers for their children. They include people
who cannot find work at all given how many military spouses are added to
the local labor pool when soldiers are brought to post, and those who are
the victims of crimes committed by the resulting large number of desper-
ate poor. They are the women beaten, stabbed, or shot by their partners,
victims found in greater numbers around military posts where training in
violence and male privilege are a stock in trade. They are the gay and les-
bian people who are unreported hate crime targets, and who live with fewer
health services given their more intense closeting in military communities.
Some of Fayetteville’s poverty is not specific to a military city economy,
but shared with that found across the United States. But the high national
rates of poverty are also related, in a more complex way, to the military bud-
get. One example of this relationship is found, paradoxically, in the mili-
tary’s generally excellent pay and benefits package, which includes universal
family health care, subsidized housing, living wages, and social support sys-
tems. Military workers are then subtracted from the total forces that could
otherwise be organized to demand such working conditions for all. In other
words, the military creates a working class divided against itself, and con-
tributes to the suggestion that the poor must pull themselves up by their
bootstraps even as the leather they inherit rots away under their touch. In
this way, the military budget helps create the tale of two cities found every-
where across the United States: misery pools of poverty and weather-beaten
cottages on one side, and six-thousand-square-foot mansions dripping with
commodities on the other, many of which house those who profit directly
or indirectly from war.
To understand Fayetteville and the connections between its predicament
and the economy of war, I have looked at its historical archive and spoken
A Tale of Two Houses, . Photographs by elin o’Hara slavick.
290 Catherine Lutz

with its residents. Some are civilians and some soldiers, and many have
penetrating insights into war and its effects. There is the challenge that
one man described, even after he had spent several decades in the army,
of reconciling the Ten Commandments with his military training. There
are the many women who described being a kind of war refugee, leaving
their hometown to avoid the overwhelming climate of objectification they
lived with under the glare of the city’s many strip bars and the young men
who pursued them. And there are the new soldiers, the great majority of
whom give college benefits as their primary reason for enlisting. The mili-
tary offered what seemed beyond their reach in high school, where they were
often ‘‘tracked’’ far below wealthier peers who did not have to exchange their
freedom for college tuition. The stories I heard included those of homeless
people, some one quarter of whom are veterans: one of their shelters was
razed when the city decided to build a . million military museum cele-
brating war and its heroes on its site.
Most people in the United States, including those now working in the
military, have never seen battlefields. But one man’s example demonstrates
the importance of seeing the bodies of war, even if via media, and refusing
the argument that it is in bad taste to show them. A Fort Bragg soldier who
helped establish the city’s Quaker House—a peace witness and draft coun-
seling center—dates his awakening to the immorality of the war in Vietnam
to one evening’s television news. He was stunned to see, as he remembered
it, ‘‘a big helicopter [with] a net under it, just full of bodies and they killed
all these people that day and they said, ‘Well now it’s just a disposal prob-
lem, we have to get rid of these bodies.’ And I don’t know what they did, they
buried them or burned or what they did. Just seeing something like that on
TV, it’s just like a click. You know this ain’t right. No.’’
If most of us have not truly seen war, we nonetheless have lived with its
haunting. Our lives have been made under the threat of nuclear Armaged-
don, and with the work of forgetting required by what has been done in our
names in faraway places. This includes the destruction of Chilean democ-
racy in , collusion in the murder of labor organizers, priests, and nuns
in Central America in the s, and support for the Indonesian army and
paramilitaries that ravaged the people of East Timor. In our name, Micro-
nesian atolls and their people were irradiated by above-ground nuclear tests
and an apartheid system was installed at Kwajalein atoll, which has been
the target for missiles regularly launched from California’s Vandenburg Air
 The Wars Less Known 291

Force Base to arch their way across the Pacific and into its cerulean lagoon.
The dead and disappeared have haunted us because we are a war culture,
our government massively involved in ordering the killing, training others
to kill, and threatening to kill. We have been doubly haunted because we
are a warrior culture without warriors: we have instead technicians of death,
who shoot through the distancing grid of instrument panels or bureaucratic
plans.We are a nation of sofa spectators who see war through that same grid,
or through fiction movies or old war footage on the History Channel, the
latter films long ago prescreened and approved for release by the Depart-
ment of Defense or its more honestly named predecessor, the War Depart-
ment. We have been doubly haunted, in other words, because after all of the
killing, the bodies are hidden away and denied.
While we live with war as entertainment, we also pay war taxes to sup-
port the multibillion-dollar military budget. The only true war profiteers
are the executives of corporations like Raytheon and General Electric whose
‘‘net earnings’’ are an order of magnitude larger than even the average cor-
poration’s bloated skimming. Many in the working and middle classes get
some small return on those taxes in the form of lower commodity prices that
the violence ensures—fuel at bargain prices because the U.S. military keeps
regimes like the Saudis’ in power in exchange for cheaper oil, imported
clothes whose prices would be higher if the United States did not train and
equip the militaries that repress labor organizing in countries where the
clothing is made. But even these slim returns to U.S. citizens prove an illu-
sion when assembly jobs have been exported from cities like Fayetteville and
moved to these very countries to take advantage of the cheap labor ensured
by U.S. military aid.

This brings us from the question of the long homefront to the long battle-
front of history. The first problem in this transition from the inside to the
outside of the nation and its history is the illusion created by nationalism.
This is the notion that safety consists primarily in defending state borders
and interests defined as a singular, people’s interest. These assumptions
make it difficult to ask why the ubiquitous monuments to U.S. soldiers who
have died in battle are not joined by others: to ask about the missing monu-
ments to the dead of the Middle Passage, the fallen of the Industrial Revo-
lution and its long cancerous tailwind, or the literally millions of deaths by
292 Catherine Lutz

automobile. That is because it is assumed that the nation cannot kill its own
people (no matter Yossarian’s insight that war does exactly that). Is it also
because we take for granted that these latter forms of carnage are mistakes,
that only war is intentional if unwanted, and only it has shaped the nation?
That said, it is important to ask about continuities between the current
war and earlier ones. They begin with the racial hatred that has preceded,
stoked, and been inflamed by nearly every one of the last centuries’ wars.
They run from the campaign against Native Americans and the enslave-
ment of Africans in the United States to the genocides in Namibia, Nazi
Germany, and Rwanda. In War without Mercy, John Dower powerfully high-
lighted how exterminationist methods on the battlefield and concentration
camps at home were reserved for the Japanese in World War II, while the
Germans were carefully separated into the good and bad among them, and
how Japanese and German imperialism had racial charters as well.2 Our cur-
rent war likewise has been enmeshed in bigotry, including bin Laden’s cry
against the infidel. But it is the Afghani people who had to flee their homes,
as the English did not when one of their own planted a bomb in his shoe
and tried to murder a jet full of people. And the chief suspect in the anthrax
terrorism that emptied the halls of Congress and killed six people is a mili-
tary biological warfare specialist who works at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Not
only do his superiors and neighbors need not worry that their training, tol-
erance, or mere proximity to him condemns them to punishment, but the
suspect himself seems to be escaping with impunity.
Continuities of past wars with this present one are evident in the cold war,
which was also advertised as a new and endless kind of clash. It was to be a
war, it was said, where the enemy would no longer fight in the open, a war
requiring the sacrifice of some freedom and principle. It would require vigi-
lance against spies and collectivists at home as well as projection of armed
might abroad. It, too, birthed a search for the enemy within and slaughter
in places far away, and it, too, stole the fruits of our labor.
The cold war was also a war by and against terror—if by this we mean
striking fear and horror into the hearts of a whole population by threatening
to kill civilians and, occasionally, doing so for demonstration effect. These
terrorists were found in the highest offices of the U.S. and Soviet govern-
ments where they planned atomic and proxy wars. They were called real-
ists, however, and their long reign of nuclear terror—in which their two
nations together targeted hundreds of millions of people in skyscrapers
 The Wars Less Known 293

and hovels—was called defense or even peace, and its architects men of
honor. It is hardly surprising but still outrageous that the hardened missile
silos, subterranean bunkers, nuclear submarines, and other infrastructure
of atomic holocaust that still form part of our landscape remain misnamed.
And so Henry Kissinger’s assistants today can sift through his gilt-edged
invitations to sip champagne in the parlors of power despite his faith in
nuclear weapons and his hand in the terrors sown in Chile, Vietnam, and
East Timor.3
The new war that George Bush wages can draw on the decades-long pub-
lic relations campaign suggesting that the larger the U.S. arsenal, the safer
we are. It can draw on the established idea that war elevates moral character
in those who wage it and those who support it. It seems not to matter to
their credibility that the elites now carrying out the war are entirely safe and
that they have just emerged into their suited warrior roles from the board
rooms of oil, construction, and military industrial corporations that stand
to profit from the war. It seems also not to matter that the war’s target has
moved breathtakingly quickly from the planners of the September  attacks
to a host of nations joined in a crazy quilt of antagonism, the Axis of Evil.
What will be next we can only imagine, but it will surely be worthy of Joseph
Heller.

What of hope, then? I have found it in dialogue and in history. Those en-
couraging conversations have been with people whose activism against the
war I try to emulate, and those others who are trying to find their way to
a moral stance toward the killing. Even those who repeat the phrase ‘‘We
have to do something’’ seem almost always more thoughtful and less venge-
ful than the voices from the electronic boxes. From the days immediately
after the attacks on New York and Washington, I have heard more people
refuse the simplicities and the certainties of those who control the airwaves
and whose framing devices overwhelmingly ask when and where the United
States will strike, not how exactly this method proposes to accomplish a safe
future.
In the second week of last September, I attended a class as a guest speaker.
The professor leading the class described to her students how angry she was
at the hijacking perpetrators and asked people to say if they were as well.
Many hands went up along with mine. When I asked the students why they
294 Catherine Lutz

were mad, however, their multiple and nuanced reasons were not the in-
structor’s. One was angry that the New York and Washington victims had
not been protected despite a three-hundred-billion-dollar military budget,
another that human beings continue to stoop to violence, another that her
world had lost its security. While the Bush administration tried to reduce
this all to a single feeling with one swift sword attached, these thoughtful,
passionate varieties of anger then seemed to me openings to reflection and
a response more ethical than indiscriminate force. They were ready to hear
that the parallel to September , , was not Pearl Harbor, because in
 it was a colonial outpost in a once-sovereign Hawaiian nation. They
were ready to ask whether this was to be the opening salvo in a new round
of worldwide violence like those that erupted in , , and , and
whether there was a way around the repetition of some of the foolish choices
of the past. Even some of those who now have multiple U.S. flags pasted on
or flying from their cars and homes and clothes mean simply to memorial-
ize the dead, not face down enemies, foreign or domestic. But the symbol’s
danger is its muteness, which allows each flag to be gathered together by
the administration and claimed as its own belligerent charter.
For years, people searching for alternatives to war have drawn some of
their resolve and sustenance from history, as Howard Zinn and others have
so eloquently motivated them to do. However familiar this history might
be to some, it bears repeating as a litany of confidence in what is possible:
from the success of Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance movement in
evicting the British Empire from India to the more than three hundred sol-
diers of the Israeli army who refused to fight in the occupied territories of
Palestine as  opened. It includes the vibrant antimilitarist tradition in
the United States from the Quakers and Mennonites to that embodied in
the Constitution. That document divides state power to make war-waging
more difficult because its framers were deeply wary of standing armies, one
of them, Samuel Adams, even warning, ‘‘It is a very improbable supposition
that any people can long remain free, with a strong military power in the
very heart of their country.’’ The flame was carried by slavery’s passive resis-
ters, escapees, and abolitionists, by the campaign against universal military
training and ROTC in the World War I era, and by the civil rights movement
whose legions faced down the terror of the Ku Klux Klan with spiritual ar-
mor. It was in the massive rebellion against the Vietnam War that occurred
within and outside the military, a rebellion that was linked with a call to end
 The Wars Less Known 295

the racism that promoted violence there and at home. And it includes the
commitments of people like Philip Berrigan who has spent years in jail for
standing in the path of U.S. weapons of mass destruction, and Dorothy Day’s
still-growing Catholic Worker movement, which births intentional commu-
nities dedicated to pacifism and justice.
The powerful antinuclear movement helped shrink the Soviet and U.S.
nuclear arsenals and delegitimate their use, and mass-membership inter-
national human rights organizations were behind near-universal accord on
conventions against land mines, chemical and biological weapons, state tor-
ture, and child soldiers. The International Criminal Court offers the pos-
sibility of trial and imprisonment for those who commit crimes against
humanity. While the United States has often been alone in rejecting these
treaties, or standing with the small group of nations it otherwise calls rogue
states, these and many other alternatives have become available and are
being used to delegitimate some of the most obscene forms of warfare.
Hope is in the worldwide mass movement that has drawn attention to the
victims of contemporary forms of economic violence. Finally, it came with
the more than , people who marched on Washington, D.C., and San
Francisco on April , calling for an end to the war on all its fronts.
When so much power is arrayed against the forces of life, it seems im-
portant to return to the places where war is planned and listen to the people
who live in the shadow of that planning and closer to its costs. Their insights
can still matter, especially while the discourse of democracy still holds some
small sway and suggests that our views should guide what the state does.
Human imagination and historical example suggest what safer and better
world is possible.

The long homefront and its future fate hinge on our reconnecting both sides
of the fence that separates the Fort Braggs and the Fayettevilles, seeing the
links between our war taxes and the division of our house against itself, and
forcing into juxtaposition the sites of carnage with the sites of good taste
and euphemism. It hangs on seeing what is done in our name both at home
and abroad, and on refusing the war planners, whether in the United States
or Israel or Al-Qaeda. As we do so, we place the bodies and the mourners
and the militarization-induced poverty where the realists must see them,
and see us seeing them. Is it wrong to imagine the war’s strategists and the
296 Catherine Lutz

oil moguls stumbling over the dead, staining their fine clothes, on their way
to a more humane, rehabilitative, and law-bound prison than the one estab-
lished at Guantanamo Bay? Is it too difficult to see how the two kinds of pub-
lic housing in Fayetteville—its barracks and its bantustans—are of a single
piece? Can we take hope in the knowledge that—because we cannot have a
gargantuan military without a hobbled homefront—we shall eliminate both
problems simultaneously in the new world we struggle to make?

Notes
 Catherine Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century (Boston:
Beacon Press, ).
 John W. Dower, War without Mercy (New York: Pantheon Books, ).
 Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (London: Verso, ).